If you've watched a major martech platform release notes feed for more than a year, you've seen the pattern. Every quarter, a torrent of new features ships. Every quarter, you adopt maybe two of them. The rest sit in the product like unopened boxes in a basement — technically owned, never used, occasionally tripped over.
This is martech platform feature bloat, and it isn't an accident of execution. It's a structural outcome of how product teams at large platform vendors get rewarded — a dynamic that Scott Brinker's annual Chiefmartec landscape has been documenting for over a decade. I've called it the Red Stapler problem for years, and once you see it, you can't unsee it.
In Office Space, Milton is obsessed with his red Swingline stapler (the cultural reference needs no introduction to anyone who's worked a corporate job). Nobody else cares about it. The stapler isn't load-bearing. Nobody's workflow depends on it. But Milton mutters about it for the entire film because it's his, and he has built his identity around defending it.
A Red Stapler feature in a martech platform is the same shape. It exists because a specific PM — let's call him the Red Stapler PM — lobbied for it, fought for headcount to build it, defended it in roadmap reviews, and shipped it under the headline "ABC Platform now supports XYZ workflow." It got a launch blog post. It got a webinar. It got two screenshots in the next analyst briefing.
And nobody outside the company asked for it.
The feature isn't bad. It's not actively broken. It's just orthogonal to the actual problem the customer base is trying to solve, and it consumes a small but real slice of every customer's mental real estate forever after, because the docs reference it, the onboarding mentions it, and the menu has a tab for it. Multiply that by ten quarters and you get a product that's vast, surfaced, and unlearnable.
I want to be fair here. Most platform PMs are smart people working hard. The Red Stapler feature problem isn't a failure of individual judgment. It's a failure of the system they operate inside.
The most common incentive structure inside large martech vendors rewards a PM for the number of features they shipped, the press they generated, and the analyst quadrant they helped move. None of those incentives reward adoption. A feature that ships with a press release and gets used by 3% of the base is, to the promotion committee, indistinguishable from a feature that gets used by 80%.
The Red Stapler PM is making a rational career bet. They're shipping the feature that's most visible, not the one that's most needed.
The vendor has 50,000 customers. The PM talks to 25 of them. Twenty of those 25 were chosen because they're the loudest, the largest, or the ones the CS team flagged as "strategic." That sample tells you nothing about what the middle 40,000 actually need. So the PM defaults to what's easy to articulate: a feature parity claim against the competitor, an integration with the AI vendor du jour, a dashboard refresh.
The features that would actually move the needle for the middle 40,000 customers — better defaults, fewer footguns, less broken behavior in the existing flows — never make the roadmap, because they don't make a good slide.
Half the features in any large platform exist because a competitor shipped them first. The PM didn't think these features were important. The analyst report did. So the PM ships a checkbox version of the feature, declares parity, and moves on. The checkbox version often works just well enough to look real in a demo and just poorly enough to be unusable in production. Customers learn this the hard way when they try to actually use it.
Every public company needs a quarterly product story for earnings, for sales, for the channel. The product marketing team needs three to five "announcements" per quarter even when the underlying engineering hasn't produced three to five things worth announcing. The Red Stapler feature is the answer to that pressure. It exists to fill a press release slot.
Once you know the pattern, you can spot them in release notes within ten seconds. The tells:
I read release notes from the major platforms every week. Most of what's in them is noise. Here's the heuristic I've settled on, which has saved my team months of wasted evaluation time:
If the feature is real, it'll still be there in six months and there will be third-party content about it — customer case studies, community posts, agency write-ups. If the feature is a Red Stapler, the launch noise will fade and the docs page will quietly stop being updated. The two-quarter wait is the cheapest signal you can buy, and it applies to the most-hyped category right now: the HubSpot AI workflow builder review I wrote at the six-month mark is a worked example.
The features that actually change customer outcomes are usually defaults — the new starting state for new accounts, the new behavior of an existing flow. These don't get press releases because they're not flashy. They show up in the release notes as one-line bullets at the bottom. Those bullets are where the actual product strategy lives.
Healthy products deprecate features. Bloated products only add. If a vendor's release notes never mention deprecations, they're accumulating Red Staplers indefinitely. Eventually the surface area becomes unmaintainable, and you'll find out the hard way — in a bug that takes six weeks to fix because the responsible PM left two years ago.
What matters more than any individual feature is whether the platform's pieces talk to each other. A new AI agent that doesn't read from your existing contact records is a demo, not a product. A new workflow type that doesn't show up in your existing reporting is a checkbox. The integration graph — how the pieces compose — is the only thing that compounds over time.
If you're a marketing ops leader trying to decide whether to adopt the new feature your vendor just announced, the answer is almost always: wait. The cost of adopting late is small. The cost of adopting early and discovering it's a Red Stapler is large — you spent training time, you re-architected a workflow, you bought into a feature that the vendor's own roadmap quietly walked away from two quarters later. The pattern shows up clearly when you run a real HubSpot implementation diagnostic: half the dormant configuration in any portal traces back to a Red Stapler somebody adopted in 2022.
The strongest filter you can apply is: does this feature address a problem I was already trying to solve? If the answer is no, the feature is for somebody else — possibly nobody. Skip it.
I covered the related but distinct question of whether your vendor is building you an ecosystem or using you as a free R&D lab in the post on choosing a martech vendor that lasts. The Red Stapler problem is the symptom. The vendor strategy that produces it is the root cause.
Look at the features you adopted in the last 18 months and ask which ones are still in production use. If the ratio is under 30%, you're being sold features faster than you can absorb them, and most of what you adopted was Red Stapler material. The other 70% became sunk-cost reasons to renew.
No. It's a property of any large enterprise software category where the vendor competes on the analyst quadrant. CRM, ERP, HR tech, security tools — same pattern. Martech just has it worse because the buyer is often a marketing ops manager, not a CIO, and the buyer rarely has the leverage to push back on roadmap.
Yes, but not in those words. Tell them which features you adopted and which you didn't, and why. Good PMs read this signal. Bad PMs ignore it. Either way, you've documented your position for the renewal conversation.
Honestly, by being small and by talking to customers more often than we talk to analysts. Every feature in our roadmap traces to a specific customer problem we've seen across multiple portals. We deprecate features that aren't getting used. That's the discipline. It doesn't scale forever — every vendor eventually faces the same pressures — but we're aware of the gravity and we fight it.
Your martech stack isn't bloated because individual platforms are badly run. It's bloated because the incentive structure of platform vendors rewards shipping over adopting, breadth over depth, and competitor parity over customer outcomes. Knowing the pattern is the first step to filtering it.
The next time a vendor demo includes a feature you didn't know you needed, ask yourself who at the vendor was promoted for shipping it. The answer is rarely "the customer."
You can see Seventh Sense's actual ship list, including what we deprecated, on our product updates page. If you want to test whether our send-time work fits a real problem in your portal, the free trial takes about 15 minutes to surface the answer.